MEXICO CITY (AP) — An alleged high-ranking Gulf drug cartel member wanted in Texas for threatening to kill U.S. federal agents was seized along with seven others in a raid on a steakhouse in Mexico City, the government news agency said Wednesday.

The agency, Notimex, reported that Juan Carlos de La Cruz Reyna, a former policeman in the northern state of Tamaulipas, is believed to be a senior figure in the Gulf cartel. He was arrested along with four Colombians and three other drug suspects, Notimex reported.

An official with the Attorney General”s Office confirmed that arrests were made when soldiers and federal police raided the Rincon Argentina restaurant in the upscale Mexico City neighborhood of Polanco on Tuesday. But he declined to name them or give details.

Mexico”s Attorney General”s Office in 2003 listed Reyna as a “direct collaborator” with the imprisoned cartel leader Osiel Cardenas, who was arrested in northern Mexico that same year.

According to a federal indictment in Brownsville, Texas, Reyna was among a group of men armed with assault weapons in 1999 who cornered Drug Enforcement Administration agent Joe Dubois and FBI agent Daniel Fuentes in their car in the border city of Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville. Cardenas, who was with the men, stuck his head and a submachine gun into the U.S. agents” car and told them he would kill the agents, who were in Matamoros to talk to an informant.

U.S. authorities say the agents only escaped death by talking their way out of the situation.

The following year, U.S. authorities offered a US$2 million (euro1.4 million) reward for Cardenas” arrest.

In January, shortly after President Felipe Calderon took office, Mexico extradited four alleged top drug traffickers to the United States, including Cardenas.

The Gulf Cartel is one of the country”s most powerful and brutal trafficking gangs and is believed responsible for much of the bloodshed along the Mexican border with Texas. Its members have tortured, beat and beheaded rivals and police, officials say.

U.S. investigators believe that at its height, the Gulf cartel had cells in Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and other U.S. cities and moved four to six tons of cocaine per month into the United States.